Fence in that Texana!

Last week, Mary Bushing did a workshop for AALS on collection analysis. It was wonderful. If you missed it, you really missed one of the best workshops I have ever attended. We expect to have her back next fiscal year.
One of the points that came out concerned local history, Texana and genealogy. Many of you know I usually advise people not to weed anything in this area. It is almost impossible to replace copies due to limited print runs from the publishers.
However, Mary had a different point of view on Texana and I thought that I should share it with everyone. Her idea is that you need to build a fence around Texana and really look into the depth (or quality) of your collection as opposed to the quantity. Mary also suggested that with a specialized regional Texana collection, you could go to ILL for any items that you don't own, but patrons are requesting. I'm not sure that ILL will work with Texana materials - we all know how hard it would be for any library to offer those items for loan. However, I must admit that lately I see really large Texana collections sitting on shelves and they don't seem to be moving. If your Texana titles are checking out (or being read if you consider them to be in-house only), great! If they aren't, and you need the shelf space, maybe you should consider moving part of your collection to storage. I honestly can't recommend to anyone to weed or discard Texana, but I can see where storing items in a work room may free up some much-needed shelf space for those popular titles that do circulate.
You may want to take a look at your Texana titles. Do they reflect South Texas, regional agriculture, history, ranching or geography? If you have titles on wheat crops in the Panhandle, politicians from East Texas or weather in the Permian Basin, and they do not circulate or have never been read, you might want to consider moving those to storage.
If you do move titles to storage, be sure to note their location on your catalog.
And my apologies to Barbara Moore in Devine who asked about keeping a 4th copy of a Texana title. I said to keep it. Now I think probably storing 3 of those copies would be better.